In her wonderful book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss quotes this sage advice from an old style guide: “If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.” I do take hyphens seriously, and it’s starting to take its toll.
There are some famous examples of how hyphenation changes the meaning of a sentence. Divorce cases hinge on the difference between extra-marital sex (sex outside marriage) and extra marital sex (a bonus from your spouse). There’s a difference between a Star Trek convention attended by 2,000-odd people and one attended by 2,000 odd people. Possibly.
Mind-numbingly pedantic
Sometimes, though, those of us who care about the little-used hyphen risk coming across as mind-numbingly pedantic. I’ve just finished proofing an academic report, and have scrawled “insert hyphen” signs by practically every paragraph.
The main culprit was the phrase “weight and eating related distress”, or variations of it. As this was the subject of the report, it cropped up fairly often.
Strictly speaking, that should be “weight- and eating-related distress”, since both “weight” and “eating” are linked to “related” to qualify the noun “distress”. But should we be so fussy? That lopsided hyphen after “weight” is hardly elegant, after all.
But it’s necessary, dammit! Consider this phrase: “The intervention led to a reduction in weight and eating related distress in patients.”
That could be taken to mean that, as a result of the intervention, the patients lost weight and experienced eating-related distress. This is the opposite of the intended meaning.
“The intervention led to a reduction in weight- and eating-related distress in patients” may be pernickety, but it’s unambiguous. And that, surely, is what charities have to aim for in their communications.
Five uses for a hyphen
1. To link related words
Mother-in-law, twenty-one, T-shirt, shot-put, Serbo-Croat, Weston-super-Mare (but Newcastle on Tyne isn’t hyphenated – check with a decent style guide (style-guide?) if you’re not sure).
2. To avoid ambiguity
Harry Redknapp resigned from Pompey, and Jermain Defoe re-signed for Spurs.
The Happy Mondays re-formed, but weren’t necessarily reformed characters.
3. With the prefixes ex-, self- and all-, and between a prefix and a capital letter or number
Ex-boyfriend, self-respect, all-inclusive, anti-American, mid-1990s
4. To stop awkward collisions of letters that make words look ridiculous or unpronounceable
Co-opt, de-ice, bell-like, re-enter, semi-independent
5. To join two or more words that serve as a single adjective (known as a compound modifier) before a noun
A low-carbon future, a funny-looking man, a 19th-century idea, a rough-and-ready approach, an out-of-the-ordinary experience.
You don’t use a hyphen if the modifying words come after the noun – so, an over-zealous proofreader but the proofreader was over zealous; hyphens are much abused but the much-abused hyphen.
Note that a little-used car – a car which hasn’t been used much – is different from a little used car – a used car which is small. Two year-old kittens are different from two-year-old kittens.
Don’t go mad
Of course, this is just the easy stuff. We haven’t yet touched on nouns formed from phrasal verbs, adjectival compound modifiers with adverbs, or present participle-noun compounds. That way madness lies.
